Ann Coulter’s joke is her ideology’s downfall.

In an apparent bid for the inhumanity Olympics, on National Coming Out Day Ann Coulter tweeted…

With Coulter, it’s virtually impossible to tell if she’s serious or joking. Either way, this is something pretty horrible to say. Aaron McQuade with GLAAD summed it up perfectly.

“There was a time in our culture’s history when, if thousands of LGBT kids were to come out on the same day, the next week genuinely would be exactly what Ann describes, all across the country. Fathers disowning their sons and kicking them out onto the street. Mothers locking up their daughters or sending them to charm school. Children forced to undergo electro-shock or even worse forms of ‘therapy’ to rid themselves of their orientation. To learn how to not be true to themselves.

And although we’ve come a long way from those ideas as a cultural collective, I have no doubt that last week, more than a few American households experienced the tragedy that Ann joked about.”

This attitude is one of the big reasons that churches are hemorrhaging followers. It’s becoming so obvious that gay people are as normal as brown-haired people, and even though people rising from the dead isn’t enough of a separation from reality to move believers away from faith and church, it seems the idea that good people are evil because of who they love is ludicrous enough to get people out of religion.

Coulter’s attitude is simply as errant as any idea can be in the 21st century.

If you want to understand the reasons behind this trend, take a moment to read a disturbing letter that Twin Cities Catholic Archbishop John Nienstedt sent to the mother of a gay son. In it, the holy man told the mother that her “eternal salvation” might depend on whether or not she embraced the anti-gay teachings of the Catholic Church, thus rejecting her own child. Talk about family values!

Such a callous admonition might have worked in the past, when people had little education. It might have resonated in bygone eras, when gays and lesbians were invisible and easy to demonize as the “other.” It might have held sway had the Catholic Church’s credibility not been left in tatters after the church spent more than $2.5 billion to clean up the wreckage wrought by pedophile priests and their enablers.

As has been said repeatedly, these people are on the wrong side of compassion, on the wrong side of humanity, and on the wrong side of history. The coming years will bring nothing for them but the increased marginalization, and the only admiration from them will come from a silent god.